From our very first moment in life to our very last, the Breath is our truest ally. When we want to hide something from ourselves, the Breath runs shallow without touching it in our depths. When it’s time to face what we’ve been avoiding, the Breath leads us surely into acceptance, forgiveness, and equanimity. When we know how to use the Breath consciously, we can return home to our divine beauty and wholeness whenever we’ve forgotten who we really are.

No matter how many times one has engaged the Breath, resistance to this powerful healing naturally arises. Resistance often precedes a breakthrough and may show up as boredom, the inner critic, or the desire to quit. Paradoxically, we dread the healing we seek.

The ego fears the unknown and the change it brings, even healing change. The ego wants to preserve the illusion of a separate identity. Yet with the Breath we are one with the Divine, connected with all of life. The Breath melts the ego and helps it surrender to the embrace of Unconditional Love as part of the holy whole.

The Breath easily removes unnecessary mental and emotional barriers to being wholly alive and present. Rick Jarow, a right livelihood coach and spiritual counselor, defines abundance as the ability to meet life as it is. The Breath likewise allows us to be with whatever is in this moment. The vast reserves of energy, freed up by no longer having to suppress the Shadow through resistance, add to our aliveness.

In our linear culture, which has forgotten the eternal cycle of birth/life/death/rebirth, much of our Shadow involves our fear of loss. Many of us are strangers to death and dying. By facing our mortality, we can wake to being alive in this moment. We can remember that death is necessary for any renewal.

The conscious connected Breath generates the embodied energy of Unconditional Love. The continuous flow of inhale and exhale oxygenates our system and activates our whole brain, whole body awareness. We move easily into a safe, natural, and reversible altered state that bypasses the limitations of the ego’s monkey mind.

People experience this elevated state as touching the Divine, being one with God/Goddess/ Creator/Buddha Nature. From this greater holistic perspective, we can meet any aspect of ourselves with compassion, love, and acceptance. Unconditional Love, the greatest medicine on the planet, heals core wounds by acknowledging their presence and releasing those that no longer serve. We can be at peace with who we are. We can freely choose to be fully alive now.

Each client and each session is a unique, precious experience. Yet in my 14 years of practice, I’ve seen clients naturally gravitate to these basic archetypes, universal modes and intentions, using conscious Breath. Over the course of a session or over a series of sessions, one may access any or all of these archetypes, in any combination or order.

ACCEPTANCE BREATH – experiencing life on life’s terms and being graced by acceptance. Knowing that the terrible things that we’ve experienced have not destroyed us. We are still here. We can do more than survive; we can thrive. Acceptance opens the way to forgiveness and gratitude for the hidden gift. Feeling right with the world.

In 1993 I attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology Conference in Indianapolis. I was exposed for the first time to two powerful healing modalities: Breathwork and Inner Bonding. Little did I know at the time that I would go on to use both of these for my own healing process and eventually integrate the two in my work with clients. As a psychotherapist and a breathworker it is my deepest desire to assist clients in listening more deeply to their authentic self. The voice of the authentic self is a subtle voice that can so easily be crowded out by obligations or pushed aside until later (many times later never comes). Inner Bonding and Breathwork are two of the best ways I know of to reconnect with this authentic self.